If you'd like to watch the musical tribute to Princess Diana currently ongoing at Wembley Stadium in London, here's the streaming link.

Prince William and Prince Harry will mark the 10th Anniversary of their mother's death with an event to celebrate her life.

Watch a live stream of the concert here, Sunday July 1, 11AM EST/8AM PST. The full concert will also be available here following the live streaming broadcast.

NBC will have a primetime special tonight with 3 hours worth at 9:00 pm ET.

Edward Lazarus is incredibly smart. His incisive writing in analyzing the law and the politics of the Supreme Court is both accessible and enlightening. But like too many other academic Broders, he is too detached to truly express, in my opinion, the seriousness of the current state of our political legal battles. In today's WaPo, he provides yet another example of that detachment:

[T]he court of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announced itself as even more conservative than William H. Rehnquist's court, which, from 1986 to 2005, undercut many of the progressive initiatives from Earl Warren's era. The Roberts court also showed little regard for the court's own precedents, overruling or eviscerating a slew of past decisions that did not conform to conservative principles.

This is a jarring, and accurate, paragraph. It should send chills down Lazarus' spine. If it does, it is not reflected in Lazarus' column:

Tom Friedman writes:

It’s too early to pronounce the U.S. military’s surge in Iraq a failure. It’s not too early to say, though, that there’s no sign that it’s succeeding — that it’s making Iraqi politics or security better in any appreciable, self-sustaining way. At best, the surge is keeping Iraq from descending into full-scale civil war. At best we are dog paddling in the Tigris. Which means at least we should start to think about what happens if we have to get out of the water.

If, Mr. Friedman Unit? But he at least accepts it is time to leave:

The first choice for many Shiites is a pro-Iranian, Shiite-dominated religious Iraq, where Sunnis have little say and little power. . . . In short, our first-choice soldiers are dying for Iraqis’ second choice. That is wrong, terribly wrong. It has to stop.

That is progress of a sort from Friedman. He blathers on about Kurdistan and other silliness but the important point is this: Tom Friedman says it is time to get out.

How do you measure cocaine use in any location? According to a new U.N. Study, it is lines per people.

Spain has the highest number of cocaine users in the world, followed by the U.S. City-wise, New York City is first, followed by Miranda de Ebro, Spain.

New Yorkers remain the world’s most enthusiastic consumers of cocaine, inhaling an estimated 134 lines of the drug for every 1,000 people. The residents of Miranda are said to get through 97 lines per 1,000 people. This compares with 20 lines per 1,000 in London, 11 in Paris and 2 in Frankfurt.

The Spanish Government, unhappy with these numbers, is bolstering its war on drugs to include restaurant waiters and bartenders who will monitor use of the bathrooms.

Alarmed by soaring cocaine use, the Spanish Government plans to train waiters and barmen in the subtle art of spotting punters who may be using the lavatories too often.

Businesses that comply will receive a special certificate declaring them drug-free.

More....

Hillary defends people like me:

Taking a swipe at a potential GOP presidential rival, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday criticized Fred Thompson for suggesting illegal Cuban immigrants pose a terrorist threat. "I was appalled when one of the people running for or about to run for the Republican nomination talked about Cuban refugees as potential terrorists," Clinton told Hispanic elected officials. "Apparently he doesn't have a lot of experience in Florida or anywhere else, and doesn't know a lot of Cuban-Americans." . . . The actor and former Tennessee senator not[ed] that the United States had apprehended 1,000 people from Cuba in 2005, Thompson said, "I don't imagine they're coming here to bring greetings from Castro. We're living in the era of the suitcase bomb." . . .

On a serious note, it was an absurd thing for Thompson to say. And it was smart politics by Hillary to slam him for it.

What it surprise you if I told you that 53% of Americans think there should be a 3rd Party? Would you think that was a huge sign that there is room for Bloomberg to make a run as an Independent? If it would let me refer you to this:

8.4%

That was the vote Ross Perot received in 1996 when, as now, 53% of Americans said to pollsters there should be a 3rd Party. Remember that when Broder, Fineman and the DC Gasbags trumpet that poll result.

The second quarter campaign revenue stats are coming in. Hillary's campaign raised in the neighborbood of $27 million, beating her first quarter total, and Obama is expected to equal or best that amount.

John Edwards is third with about $9 million and in 4th place, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has raised $7 million.

Richardson also grew his number of individual donors from the first quarter, from 24,270 to 38,000.

When do candidates like Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, who can't win, drop out and work for the benefit of the Democratic party instead of themselves?

I have always thought Richardson is campaigning for the VP slot on the ticket. So I'll give him a pass and say he should hang in there for now.

Related: HillCam is coming.

More...

Continuing from Friday's post on giving bloggers the the Gift of Traffic this holiday weekend, here's the latest.

• Avedon Carol of Sideshow has picked up the Traffic theme and found some great links to some of the better versions of some Traffic Songs.

"The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys" [Update: Live version, Pt.1 and Pt.2.]

Live Winwood: "Dear Mr. Fantasy".

... more here.

• Larry Johnson at No Quarter on Glasgow Burning, Run for Your Lives . The right-wing blogs and CNN are all London, all Glasgow all the time. It's like Dear Mr. Fanstasy, give us a terror attack so we can tell the world we're right to be in Iraq. Mahablog thinks so too.

More...

Scott Lemeiux and Jon Zasloff comment on the "academic Broderitis" of Cass Sunstein (something I alluded to yesterday). Zasloff writes:

Sunstein suggested last year that John Roberts would be the quintessential legal craftsman, and thus a judicial minimalist. Conservative to be sure, but carefully so. And what has happened this year? Roberts marching in lockstep with Scalia, Thomas, and the other radicals. You might think that this has given Sunstein second thoughts. But no.

In The New Republic, he acknowledges

It turns out that with stunning regularity, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are indeed voting the same way as their conservative colleagues." But he insists that there is a divide, because Roberts and Alito do so on narrower grounds. . . . Here, in a nutshell, is the division between the Court's conservative minimalists and its visionaries," Sunstein proclaimed.

This is really grasping at straws. Does Sunstein really think that the next time taxpayers sue over a legislative appropriation, Alito and Roberts will gravely uphold standing, saying that they are bound by the precedent? If so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell him. . . . Remarkably, . . . Sunstein still won't acknowledge what is going on. Call it the academic equivalent of Broder-itis: you're so above-it-all that you can't see what is happening.

Yep.

Omar Khadr, the young Canadian Gitmo detainee whose charges were dismissed in early June because the judge ruled he had not been properly designated an enemy combatant, will not have his charges reinstated.

A military panel had declared Khadr an "enemy combatant" but Brownback said that did not meet the strict definition of the law that authorized the tribunals.

He said the distinction was critical because international law requires other types of trial for captives who are considered "lawful enemy combatants."

"The term 'unlawful' is not excess baggage, and it is not mere semantics, it is a critical predicate to jurisdiction," Brownback wrote in the ruling.

Canadian news has this in depth profile of the Khadr family. In 2005, the Toronto Star reported Omar's alleged torture while at Guantanamo.

When I was in law school, a discussion of the Equal Protection Clause dedicated great deal of focus on footnote 4 in U.S. v. Carolene Products:

There may be narrower scope for operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appears on its face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution, such as those of the first ten Amendments, which are deemed equally specific when held to be embraced within the Fourteenth. [cites omitted] It is unnecessary to consider now whether legislation which restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation, is to be subjected to more exacting judicial scrutiny under the general prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment than are most other types of legislation. . . . Nor need we enquire whether similar considerations enter into the review of statutes directed at particular religious,[cites mitted] or national, [cites omitted], or racial minorities. [cites omitted]; whether prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry. . . .

(Emphasis supplied.) More.

The death toll keeps rising in Iraq. Among the details in today's article about Saturday's raid on Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum, is this news:

....two American soldiers are accused of killing three Iraqis in separate incidents, then planting weapons on the victims' remains, the military said in a statement. Fellow soldiers reported the alleged crimes, which took place between April and this month near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, it said.

The U.S. military on Saturday identified the soldiers as Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley from Candler, N.C., and Spc. Jorge G. Sandoval from Laredo, Texas.

More....